At the Federal Reserve Board
from September 26 through December 2, 2005

The Fine Arts Program of the Federal Reserve Board opens the 2005 fall season with The Art of Hungary, 1915 Revisited. The exhibit presents twenty-six paintings, prints, and a pastel that are representative of the international stature of Hungarian art at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. Along with their contemporaries from around the world, Hungarian artists were included in this international survey of paintings embracing "the modern spirit of contemporary painting."

Béla Iványi-Grünwald, Park in Keskechet, 1910
Collection of Jill A. Wiltse and H. Kirk Brown III, Denver

The Panama-Pacific Exposition, like most international fairs, featured a fine arts section. Ninety years later, with the proliferation of scholarship and museum exhibitions, recognition of other artists whose works were in the exposition--such as Mary Cassatt and William M. Chase (American), Maurice Denis, Albert Marquet, and Félix Vallotton (French), Edvard Munch (Norwegian), Giovanni Segantini (Italian), and Vincent van Gogh (Dutch)--is standard. However, the same cannot be said of their Hungarian counterparts--Adolf Fényes, Károly Ferenczy, Béla Iványi-Grünwald, József Rippl-Rónai, and János Vaszary.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Hungarian painters and their contemporaries looked to France and adopted French methods and styles. Indeed, artists of all nationalities were daring to use bold colors and embracing new ideas about plein-air effects of light and shadow. They were also experimenting with the handling of the brush. Hungarian artists were breaking from old academic norms and experimenting with modernism--but not to the exclusion of their own nationalistic consciousness. The critic Christian Brinton wrote of this generation of Hungarian painters: "The art of Hungary is before [all] else a typically rhapsodic expression. You feel in it a marked degree of rhythm and a rich, vibrant harmony rarely if ever encountered elsewhere."

Ödön Márffy, Camp at the Isonzo, 1914-18
The Salgo Trust for Education

The aftermath of the First World War sent Hungary into virtual political isolation. Consequently, foreign influences were filtered out. Progressive painters who wanted the latest news from leading art centers, such as Paris, were left with little choice but to leave the country. In this context, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the state of Hungarian art as represented in San Francisco in 1915 was an international success among peers that would not be equaled in the twentieth century.